I've had little progress this week, and couldn't update my blog last week, due to final exams of my final semester. But since the exams are about to end, I think at least I can document my previous to last week's progress.

I analyzed a good number of python C modules using gcov manually. The results seem good and encouraging and gcov seems to be the right tool for the coverage. The fact that it requires modules to be linked in statically into Python is a bit of a trouble, but after having a detail discussion with my supervisor, Seth, we decided on assuming the following two points for my later work on integrating the gcov reports into figleaf:

1. The user has already compiled Python with modules statically linked in
2. Proper arguments were used with gcc during the compilation process so to let gcov track the coverage.
   

Lots of manual work during the past weeks. It is actually time to start coding all of it, and I've to start first with letting figleaf take care of the C code coverage report generation too. I've been looking through the figleaf code to figure out how to best achieve that goal, and will document any changes made here on the blog.

In the meantime, I've also started to look into improving the test coverage by writing new test cases. I found the unittest module to be interesting to start with as it has around half coverage, and would be interesting writing unit tests for the unittest module itself.